


Widower

by paramountie



Category: Talented Mr Ripley (1999)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 09:08:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11711286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paramountie/pseuds/paramountie
Summary: He books a flight to America as soon as he can. Not back to New York. New York is too familiar and clogged with people. People with Dickie’s golden hair and Dickie’s delicate hands. People with Peter’s sloping neck, Peter’s rolling laugh, Peter’s smooth skin.He wants to be alone. He wants to go someplace where no one will ever look at him.





	Widower

**Author's Note:**

> You will never let go, you will never be satiated.  
> You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger.
> 
> Your body will age, you will continue to need.  
> You will want the earth, then more of the earth–
> 
>  
> 
> _"The Sensual World", Louise Glück_

The best revenge is living well. That's what Tom’s mother told him when he was ten years old and the other boys hated him. Because he was soft-spoken and soft-bellied, always answered the teacher’s questions and never hit any home runs. Because he didn't seem to understand the elaborate language of shoves and hair-pulling that the rest of the children spoke.

So they hit him. They hit him and they kicked him, every day for weeks on end.

His mother wasn't angry at him, for being so weak. She simply brushed the hair back from his bruised forehead and told him that the other children didn't understand.

“You’re special, you see,” his mother said, as she began sponging the blood off of his cheek. “The rest of them are jealous.”

“Jealous?” Tom asked. His lip was split, and the pain had drained down to a dull throb. He kept licking at the cut anyway. The sting of it distracted him.

“Mm-hmm,” said his mother. She picked up a bandage, and pressed it against Tom’s skin with feathery fingers. “One day you’ll be rich and powerful, and they’ll be sorry for treating you so terribly.”

“What do I do until then?” Tom asked, but his mother did not reply. Instead she stood and smoothed out the wrinkles on her fine blue skirt- now pockmarked with bloodstains.

“You need ice,” she said, before disappearing into their tiny kitchen.

In the following weeks, she never got around to answering his question. But every time he’d come home bloody, she’d say the same thing. The best revenge is living well. That's all he needed to do, to win in the end.

* * *

He doesn't spend much time in Greece. The country is too small. The whole damn continent is too small for him now. He can't take a step without running into someone who knows him, or knows Dickie. His lies have started to stumble into each other, tangle together like the leashes of two fighting dogs. He's become sloppy, and sluggish. He's forgetting faces and stepping on toes, and he can’t seem to go an hour without crying. No one’s caught him at it, but his swollen red face has drawn stares.

He books a flight to America as soon as he can. Not back to New York. New York is too familiar and clogged with people. People with Dickie’s golden hair and Dickie’s delicate hands. People with Peter’s sloping neck, Peter’s rolling laugh, Peter’s smooth skin.

He wants to be alone. He wants to go someplace where no one will ever look at him.

On the flight over, he sleeps, and has sickening nightmares. He’s drowning, he’s bleeding out. Peter is dead. Peter is alive. Tom is living a good long life. Tom is living for hundreds of years. Tom will never die. Peter’s skin is peeling away from his face, coming off in thin strips like wallpaper. Tom’s skin is sour and rotten and stubbornly alive.

When he wakes up, his body is young again. His heartbeat is pounding steadily in his temple and his neck. He’s healthy and strong. He can’t escape the feeling that he’s starting it all over.

* * *

Peter wanted a house in the countryside. He didn’t care which countryside.

“It’ll be huge,” he’d said, sprawling out on his bed, with his arms stretched out to every corner. “I’ll walk for hours and never touch a wall.”

“You hate walls?” Tom asked. There was a laugh bubbling up in his chest, the way there always seemed to be when Peter was around. Peter tossed him a lazy grin.

“Hate them. They appall me.”

“Ah,” Tom said. He was inching forward, closer and closer to the edge of the bed. He wanted to sit there, because he always wanted to be as close to Peter as possible. He always wanted to touch him. It was like Tom couldn’t rest if he wasn’t pressed against Peter. His feet in his lap, his hand on his hands, his fingers cupping his waist.

But he needed to be careful. He shouldn’t touch Peter as much as he wanted to.

“And I’ll have sixty bedrooms,” Peter said, eyes sliding shut, “And sixty dogs.”

“Dogs?”

Now, Tom was perched on the edge of the bed, staring out the window. Fine golden sunlight was curling into his skin, and the weight of Peter behind him made something in Tom feel steady. Silent. Still.

“Don’t you like dogs?” Peter asked.

“I wouldn’t know,” Tom replied. “I’ve never had one.”

In one quick motion, Peter was up and his arms were dropping heavily onto Tom’s shoulders.

“You poor bastard,” Peter said, tucking his forehead into the crook of Tom’s neck. His breath was warm, and Tom thought he’d be able to count every single one of Peter’s eyelashes, just from the way they tickled his shoulder. “I’m getting us a dog, as soon as I can.”

“Alright.”

Peter’s arms tightened around him.

“What do you want to name it?” he asked. For a moment, Tom didn’t answer. He just let his head tip forward, so that his lips were brushing against the bones of Peter’s wrist.

“Whatever you want,” Tom said, more to Peter’s hands than to Peter himself.

“I’ll think about it,” Peter said, pressing a kiss above Tom’s collarbone. He pulled away, then. For a second, Tom felt like he was coming apart. Like his soul would slide out and slither away, now that Peter wasn’t there to keep it in place.

* * *

The house Tom buys is huge, luxurious, and expensive. It’s the best he can afford on the money coming in from Mr. Greenleaf, and it’s better than anything he would have dreamed up a year ago. It was built in the 1890s by some rich eccentric, and no one had lived there since the original owner drowned in his clawfoot bathtub.

The front of the house is covered in smooth white paint, with a wraparound porch and a large, carefully manicured lawn. Inside there are more rooms than Tom will ever use. More rooms than he’d use even if Peter were living with him. Peter and their dogs. Every step Tom takes seems to echo for hours and hours, the sound moving through every room until it comes back to him, weak and quiet. It makes him feel like he’s dead, like he’s in the afterlife and there’s no one else around. Like even hell wasn’t the right spot for him, so they made him a place of his own.

There aren’t any neighbors for miles and miles, just rolling hills and farmland. He hears animals all the time but he never seems to see them. Invisible birds singing to each other. Invisible dogs howling out.

Peter would have loved this house. He would have found a reason to use every single room. He would have appreciated the solitude, because he was sick of talking to people anyway. And because it meant he could kiss Tom whenever he wanted. They could hold hands on the porch, and fall asleep together in front of the bay windows.

Peter would have loved this house, and his love would have made Tom love it. Tom thinks that with Peter by his side, he could have loved any place. He would have been happy living at the bottom of the ocean, or on a grimy street corner, making beds out of old newspapers and apple peels.

But Peter isn’t here and so Tom hates this place. The whole world has become dim and repugnant. Most days he either despises it or is horribly bored by it.

Tom’s very life seems to have become a sweater, shrunken in the wash. It’s too close and too constant, making his skin itch and his wrists go numb. It’s all he can do not to slip out of it entirely.

* * *

He refuses to go without a single luxury. If he wanted, he could live as well as Dickie, without the necessity of a lie. There's nothing stopping him from eating at exclusive restaurants every night, from seducing gorgeous women wearing ribbons of diamonds, from traveling all over the world. He could recreate Dickie’s life, down to the boat and the fiancé, and he wouldn't even have to change his name.

He doesn't want to. In Venice, he realized that none of it was ever what he wanted. He wanted the life that Peter had envisioned for them. The life that Peter had crafted in idle moments.

“We should move somewhere with a garden,” Peter would say, stopping in the middle of their walks to admire people’s window boxes. He’d point out the bursts of purple violets, the tangled pink of bougainvillea. “I used to love the garden at my parents’ house.”

Or he would promise to make Tom his signature dishes in the kitchen they would someday own. One that wasn't cramped, like Peter’s, or moldy, like Tom’s.

“I've been told that my spaghetti carbonara is excellent,” he would tell Tom and Tom would believe him, instantly. It was almost like he could already taste it on his tongue.

“I wish I could cook,” Tom would reply. Peter would grin, and press his thumb to the downturned corner of Tom’s mouth.

“I’ll teach you,” he’d say, “You’ll be as good at it as you are at everything else.”

In Tom’s new house, he is teaching himself to cook. The kitchen is expansive, filled with every utensil and implement he could ever use, and some he's sure he never will. He follows the recipes to the letter, but he's not sure if he's getting any better. Everything he makes tastes lifeless.

Most days, he manages to cook without incident, but one day, the knife slips while he is cutting tomatoes. It carves out a chunk on the inside of his thumb, and the blood pours onto the cutting board, disappearing into the red skin of the tomato. His carefully sliced pieces suddenly look grisly, like raw meat.

Once, Peter cut himself while puttering around in the kitchen, and the sight of blood pooling in his cupped hand made something in Tom go crazy. He became frantic, running to fetch the bandages and applying them with shaking fingers.

“It’s alright,” Peter told him, laughing at the panicked expression on Tom’s face. “I'm fine. And that awful knife will get what's coming to it.”

For the rest of the day, Tom’s heartbeat never seemed to slow back down.

Now, the same panic is setting in, and he needs to put the knife down before he cuts open more skin. He should clean the bloody mess up, he knows, but all he can seem to do is brace his hands against the counter and take harsh breaths. He is crying now, and he can't figure out why. Sometimes he thinks of Peter and nothing happens. Nothing at all. But sometimes he gets like this.

* * *

The woman at the farmer’s market likes him.

She’s in her forties, with broad shoulders and rough hands. When she smiles, an elaborate network of laughter lines radiate from her brown eyes. She smiles at Tom every time she sees him.

“What’ll it be this time, honey?” she asks him when he walks up. “Did you like the plums?”

“They were lovely,” Tom replies, “But I have a list today. I’m making a new recipe.”

“Hand it over,” the woman says, and Tom does so. He crosses his arms while she starts gathering up peaches and apples, and putting them into paper bags. She’s never been one for small talk, but Tom doesn't mind. He never quite got a handle on it, either.

Her husband is much chattier, but Tom still doesn't mind. He seems to content to talk to himself for hours, as long as Tom is nodding along.

The husband appears when his wife is gathering up some strawberries. He’s a bit smaller than her, stocky, with a wash of dark hair, but he smiles just as easily as she does.

“What are you doing?” he asks, when he appears by his wife’s elbow. She hums in question. “You should be resting your foot.”

“I’m fine, Harry,” she says, “The swelling’s gone down.”

“This woman nearly broke her ankle yesterday,” Harry tells Tom, and his wife shakes her head. “She fell clean off the top of the steps. But she won’t sit down, no matter what I tell her.”

“Ah,” Tom says. Harry slips his arm around his wife’s waist, and she leans into him. Tom lowers his eyes.

“Please sit down,” Harry says, “I’ll finish up for you.”

With a sigh, the woman takes a seat next to the register.

“He always fusses over me,” she says to Tom, “I don't know why. Husbands are a mystery to me.”

Tom isn’t sure how he’s supposed to reply to this.

“Are you married?” she asks.

The question catches him off guard, and he lies, almost by instinct.

“Widower,” he answers, and the woman lifts a hand to her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and Tom doesn’t know how to reply to this either.

“Thank you,” is all he can say. They don't talk again as he pays, and heads back to his car.

* * *

He doesn’t have any right to grieve for Peter. To attend his funeral, or visit his grave. Those things are reserved for his friends and family. People who loved him enough to never hurt him. Tom lost his claim to grief months ago.

It doesn’t stop him from thinking about him. From missing him. Sometimes he pretends that all of this is cut and dry. That the horrible well of guilt and sadness that lives in him constantly is simply sadness. Nothing more, nothing less. Perhaps Peter died in a car accident, or fell ill. Perhaps Tom is the grieving husband that he pretends to be. Perhaps Tom loved him enough to die for him, instead of the other way around.

He wishes that he could mourn for Peter cleanly.

He would put violets on his grave. He would carry a picture of him everywhere. He’d tell everyone about the how kind he was, how gentle.

All of that is more than what Tom deserves.

* * *

In New York, he spent most of his nights talking to himself in his cramped apartment. The only people he knew were acquaintances from work, who avoided him if they didn’t need a favor. Sometimes the old man across the hall would come over, and he would pinch Tom’s cheek and teach him how to make lasagna. Most of the time, he was too busy with his grandchildren.

Now, Tom doesn’t let himself be alone for long stretches of time. He drives up to the city and goes out to bars. Making friends is a skill, like any other, and Tom knows he can master it.

When he gets better at cooking he throws dinner parties, and everyone compliments his cooking, and his garden, and his large old house.

“How can someone so rich be so sweet?” his friend Gwen asks. He met her at her younger sister’s engagement party. She got roaring drunk and sobbed into Tom’s shirt about how she’d never met a good man, not even once.

“I wasn’t always rich,” Tom answers, because he’s made it a practice not to lie unless he needs to.

“That explains it,” Gwen says. She turns away from him then, to talk to the others pressed together on Tom’s couch.

Today, he’s invited over as many people as were available, and they’re all on their way to being pleasantly drunk. It’s easier, in a group like this. Everyone entertains each other, and Tom can slip away. He’s barely had to string ten words together the whole night.

He heads towards the piano, and starts plucking out a few notes. He closes his eyes, but he still feels Gwen settle into the seat next to him.

“Teach me something,” she says, and he finally turns his head to look at her. Some distant, almost scientific part of him notes that she’s beautiful, with shimmering blonde hair and a shining mouth. Her knees are turned towards him, and her hand on the piano bench is creeping towards his thigh.

If he wanted, he could make her fall in love with him. They could get married, and have children. Then he’d always have someone to talk to at night.

“Alright,” he says, and stands. She smiles when he slips his arms around her shoulders, and puts his hands over hers. “I’ll teach you a lullaby.”

“Please.”

Her hair smells like soap, and her body is warm. He hasn’t held anyone like this in months. He doesn’t think he’s even touched anyone in months. The noise of the party is a soothing hum, and she’s so alive in his arms. So soft and glowing. He should marry her. Isn’t that why he did all of this? So that he could be a rich man, and marry any woman he wanted? Isn’t that why he killed Dickie, and Freddie? Isn't that why he killed Peter?

The first time he kissed Peter, they were sitting at the piano bench in Tom’s apartment, playing a duet. Tom was playing his half perfectly, but Peter kept hitting wrong notes and smacking against Tom’s fingers. He’d apologize every time, so sincerely, but he could barely keep his laughter contained. By the end of the song, his giggles were almost as loud as the sour notes he kept playing.

“I can see how you’re a professional musician,” Tom said and Peter let out a great sigh as he collapsed against Tom’s shoulder.

“We make a great team,” he said, “What should we play next?”

“I think my fingers are bruised.”

“Oh dear,” Peter said. Carefully, he picked up one of Tom’s hands and examined it. He was as gentle as he would have been if Tom were actually injured.

“Will I live?” Tom asked, and Peter grinned, not letting go of him.

“God, I hope so,” he said, and Tom thinks he must have lost his mind then, because he cupped Peter’s sweet, soft face in his hands and he kissed him.

He doesn’t know if it was any good, the kiss. He’d done it before, a couple of times, but it had always been dry and meaningless. But he remembers wanting to be close to Peter, as close to him as possible, and kissing was all he could think of.

Still, he wanted to be closer. He always did.

When he pulled away, Peter looped his arms around Tom’s neck.

“Why didn’t you tell me that was what you wanted?” he asked, “We could have done that instead of playing piano.”

He imagines kissing Gwen, the same way he kissed Peter. Kissing her when he wakes up in the morning, when he passes her in the hallway. Kissing her shoulder because it’s what’s closest to him, or her forehead to smooth away her worry. He imagine a whole life of kissing her instead of Peter, and he feels sick, feels like sobbing.

As soon as he can, he sends everyone home.

* * *

On the one year anniversary of Peter’s death, Tom doesn’t wake up until the late afternoon. He spent most of the night in fitful sleep. He’d wake up for one hour and toss and turn for another. His thoughts and his dreams blended continuously, until he barely knew if he’d slept at all. When he finally opened his eyes, orange afternoon sun was pouring into the room, and for a long time he thinks this must be a dream as well. He never sleeps this late. He never wakes up already feeling heavy and miserable. Most mornings, in the moments after he opens his eyes, he can forget who he is. Where he is. Is he in Mongi, sleeping next to Dickie’s bed? His apartment in New York? Curled up against Peter, their sides perfectly aligned?

Today, he knows who he is, and he knows that he’s alone. He knows that he wants to die. The wish is bone deep and irrepressible.

There’s nothing for him in this world anymore. Nothing he wants and nothing he needs.

The breath in his chest gets snagged, and he puts a hand to his mouth. Tears leak out of his eyes and roll against his fingers. If Peter were here he would put a hand on Tom’s stomach and make him breath, slow and even, twenty breaths in and twenty breaths out. He would ask Tom what he’d been dreaming about, and Tom wouldn’t tell him.

All he ever dreams about now is Peter.

* * *

That day, he decides, will be his last. He’s not sure how he’ll go about dying, but he knows it will be easy enough. There are a thousand and one options surrounding him, and there’s no rush.

He doesn’t have any affairs to attend to. There’s no one to leave money too, and Mr. Greenleaf will notice soon enough that his checks are being sent to a dead man. The people he’s met in the last year are kind enough, but he thinks he’ll spend his last day alone. He doesn’t want to have to lie to anyone today.

In the morning, he plays piano, and in the afternoon, he goes for a walk in the hills surrounding his house. He wonders what Peter would say, if he were walking next to him. What would he see that Tom doesn’t? Would he notice the bright red cardinal, flickering through the trees? Would he love the feeling of the sun on his face, just a little too hot?

Peter used to like to lie in the sun, even when it burned him. He said it felt like being cooked. When Tom shook his head, Peter protested. If he could choose any death, he’d pick boiling. At least he’d never have to worry about being cold again.

Tom came around to his point, because he always did. Peter could convince him of anything.

That night, Tom goes for a drive. He’s not sure what he’ll do when he gets back home. His ideas still haven’t come together completely. But he’s always liked driving on these long, solitary country roads. It slows his thoughts down, as if they were a spool of thread being unravelled with each mile.

Some part of Tom wants to keep driving this way the rest of his life. Never stopping, just going forward until he hits the edge of the world.

He doesn’t see the deer in the road until his headlights flash green against its eyes.

* * *

Instinctively, he swerves to avoid it.

The car hits the edge of the road, hard, careening into a ditch. The windshield shatters as the front of the car slams against the ground, and then the world is flipping.

It all happens so slowly. The ground comes inching towards him, and some part of Tom thinks that he can still prevent all of this, can still turn the wheel and get back on the road. Then the roof hits the dirt.

Tom feels himself falling towards the roof, but the seatbelt cuts him short. It slices into the skin of his neck.

For a long moment, all he does is hang there. There is a faint trickle of blood running down his chin, his cheekbones, but he doesn’t feel much of anything else. Slowly, his vision goes a hazy red.

He could die here. It would be so easy.

It wouldn’t be a suicide. It wouldn’t be him giving up, and throwing away the life that he fought so hard for. It would be fate. There was a deer in the road. He flipped his car. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to him again, if he survived this day.

After years of fighting for a better life, fighting to be respected, to be noticed, he could die in a ditch on the side of the road. That would be justice, wouldn’t it? It would be what he deserved. No judge on earth could craft a finer punishment than this.

Some part of Tom knows that even this is a lie.

He has the life he’s always wanted, because he fought for it. He killed for it.

But it stopped being the life he wanted in Venice. Something fundamental in him changed, and all he wanted was Peter. Now, all he wants is to join him. To take it all back, or to forget it ever happened.

He killed Peter so that he could live and now he's going to let himself die. What a waste that would be. What a cruel, cruel waste.

Peter was kind and Peter was gentle. He loved Tom even though there was nothing good in him. He took care of him.

The red in Tom’s eyes grows opaque.

Would Peter want him to live, or would he want him to die?

Peter loved him. Peter was the only one who ever did.

If he loves Peter, he can't let himself die. Dying won't be his punishment, not anymore. He killed Peter so that he could live, and now he has to live. He has to live until he can’t anymore.

He presses the button of his seatbelt, and lets himself slide to the top of the car. The window next to him is shattered, bits of glass glowing in the moonlight, tracing a jagged path back up the hill.

Slowly, and carefully, he pulls himself out of the car. He’ll live through this. He’ll live through anything.

The grass is wet under his hands, and painfully cold. Blood curls around his fingers as he drags himself up the hill, and towards the road. He’ll live through this.

He’ll live. He’ll live and live and keep living. He’ll have a good, long life.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [tumblr](http://paramountie.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
